Posted
by
Roblimo
on Thursday June 12, 2014 @03:23PM
from the my-dog-is-doggier-than-your-dog dept.

By day John Hawley is a mild-mannered open hardware evangelist for Intel. But after hours he is the master of K-9, a robot dog he works on a little at a time. Yes, this is a Whovian thing, which is why John's K-9 looks so much like the Doctor's. But K-9 is also a pretty good dog on his/her own. No vet bills, no constant hunger, no barking at feral cats in the middle of the night, obeys every command... so maybe Dr. Who and John Hawley have the right idea when it comes to canines. Except.... aww.... my dog, Terri the Terrorist Terrier, just licked my hand. What a sweetie! Terri may not take orders from a hand-held remote, but she has a lot of other fine characteristics, including affection. K-9 is very cute in a squared-off, mechanical way, though. Hard to resist, despite a lack of soft fur and no tongue for licking his/her master's hand. (Alternate Video Link)

Tim:
So John, we’re here at Maker Faire. First of all, tell us what
your job is. This is one of the coolest jobs.

John:
So my job title is the open hardware technical evangelist—I
work for Intel. I work under the open source technology group inside
of Intel.

Tim:
And you are actually one of the people who are here with a nice
distinction that you’re not here to promote a Kickstarter?

John:
No, I’m not doing anything with Kickstarter at this point, I’ve
already made my thing and I’m done.

Tim:
I’m going to pan over here and show everybody what it is that
we are standing next to. This is your K9?

John:
Yep, this is K9. He is a replica of the 1970s and 1980s Tom Baker era
Doctor Who character. He is just about the right size with a couple
of concessions just to get him into the crates to get him onto
aircraft. But, yeah, he is here, he runs a MinnowBoard which is an
open hardware platform that’s jointly done between Intel and
CircuitCo. And yeah, so he is here, he’s doing stuff, he’s
got some sensors, he’s got an accelerometer and GPS, he’s
got a little remote control so I can actually drive him through the
crowds. So, yeah, he’s just

Tim:
It’s remote controlled using an Xbox?

John:
It is an Xbox controller. The MinnowBoard is running Linux so it
just seizes the joystick and so when I push forward it tells the
motors to go forward. When I pull backwards, the motors go
backwards.

Tim:
How long did you take to build this?

John:
It took about six months of my spare time, hobby time and whatnot.
He’s gone through about 18 different iterations on various
pieces at this point.

Tim:
You mentioned shipping on crates and the concessions are necessary to
try to get this into an airplane.

John:
Yeah. So it takes three Pelican cases, which if you’re not
familiar with, the Pelican cases are these big large very sturdy
plastic cases that the military typically uses to ship all of their
stuff around. It takes three of these cases to get him on to a plane.
When he’s all crated up, he weighs about 130 lbs. The
airlines love me and whenever they see me coming, they are going,
“Okay, what the heck is in the box?”

Tim:
Can you talk a little bit about what the hardware is, the electronic
hardware? Talk about the actual transportation hardware, the wheels,
the motor.

John:
Oh yeah. He’s got 3” track tank treads on the bottom
made by a company called Lynxmotion. He’s got about 4’
on each sides, so there’s about 2’ of tank tread actually
touching the ground at any given time. So he can go over just about
any terrain.

Tim:
So what about battery and battery life?

John:
So he’s got three batteries in him, one of which powers,
there’s an LCD screen on one side and that’s the arm, it
powers that and the speakers. And then there are two batteries in
the bottom both are lithium LiPo pods. One is dedicated specifically
to the motors and other is dedicated to just powering his brains the
MinnowBoard.

Tim:
I see that you can control himwith your remote
control, can you also program his actions?

John:
Yeah, I can program his actions. He runs Linux and the entire
control program is just written in C, so if I wanted to have him do
something different, it’ll be fairly trivial to just change
that code, recompile it, throw it on the dog and he’ll be good
to go.

Tim:
So what kind of Linux do you run on it?

John:
So it’s actually running a Yocto project derived Linux
distribution called Angstrom Linux. It’s a basic embedded
operating system and it works fine for my purposes.

Tim:
And your purposes are you said before that what you did is a lark?

John:
Yeah, I made K9 on a lark. I had a friend in Albuquerque, she owns
her own Tardis, she’s fitted out her truck to look like what
she calls the Tardis recovery vehicle. She drives this Tardis around
to all these conventions. And I like Doctor Who, she loves Doctor
Who, obviously, and I’m like “You know what, I’m
going to build K9”, so I started building K9 in what was it,
September of 2012 and this is where he’s at at this point.

Tim:
Tell me about top speed.

John:
Top speed about 3 miles an hour on a good day.

Tim:
How much does he eat, electricity?

John:
Electricity, he’s got – I’m going to think of the
top of my head, about 20 amp hours of battery in him, so it takes
about 6 hours of charging to get him up.

Tim:
Have you published the plans?

John:
Well, K9 himself – there are plans out there on the internet
and I just followed most of those, the guts and everything to K9, I
haven’t actually put
them up yet, but I do intend to get that taken care of at some point.

Wow. That's a lot of obligatory fan responses. You must be easy to wind up! I've loved K9 and all of the robot animals ever since they appeared with Dr. Who and his granddaughter in "King Kong Escapes". I can't believe anyone ever watched that BBC ripoff TV version.

Why are you assuming they are referring to the character rather than the show? That works just as well in context. e.g. "Maybe Star Trek and Patrick Stewart had the right idea on how to deal with aggressive hive-minds."

Dogs can be very sensitive to their owners feelings i.e. "You're feeling down friend, maybe a lick on the hand will make you feel better" and each one has it's own personality (anyone whose owned multiple dogs knows that) and while the idea of a robot dog modeled after K-9 is cool there's just no programming love. (at least right now)

I can't speak to all breeds but there have been many recorded cases of dogs guarding their owners dead body's without any signs that the animal ate any part of the owner and it took animal control to take the dog away because it wouldn't allow anyone to come close.

My dogs have always been incredibly sensitive to my feelings, if I'm down they'd come over and lay their head on my foot or lap or go get their ball and throw it at me as if to say "Come on buddy, lets have some fun". I've never heard of a dog eat

But this honestly doesn't impress me as a K-9 replica. Sure, it seems like it's a decent start on one, but it looks far from finished. Even if all that is really left to do on is just "spit 'n polish" to make it look like the genuine article, it seems almost as far from a replica of K-9 as it would be to apply the term 'light saber replica' to a painted broom handle.

And its head doesn't even move... no extensible nose antenna or waggy ears or tail.

Nope.... just nope.

Like I said though... maybe I've just gone to too many cons or something, because I've seen vastly more impressive replicas of K-9 and other famous robots than this in recent years.

I have to say that I was not overly impressed as well. To this guy's credit, however, at least this one was equipped with (although you do not ever actually see it, but are going only by what the fellow claims about it) all-terrain tank treads that would enable it to move over any surface, while most of the decent K-9 replicas that I've seen would not perform very well on soil, or dirt, for example.